The Informationist

Unbearable Frustration and a Call for Empathy

Last Tuesday night, I attended an event hosted by a group called Peace X Peace. The speaker was an Iraqi “peace activist” (and I use the quotation marks only because I never quite know what the term means) named Naba Saleem Hamid.

Dr. Hamid is bright, well educated, fluent in English, unveiled (if not entirely secular), and quite articulate. As I understood it, she has never been an exile; she lived in Baghdad throughout at least most of the Baath period. She came to tell us The Truth about the situation in Iraq. She opened by expressing her dismay with the various government officials who questioned the Truth that she had come to share. She then spoke about the miseries of everyday life in Iraq, the discrepancies between her own experiences and those reported in the international press, and the animosity toward Americans that she saw growing.

During the question period, two other Iraqi women joined in—a veiled woman who expressed even greater resentment of the American presence, and a smartly dressed Kurdish woman quite grateful for everything that the U.S. has done to free Iraq.

It was a fairly intense two-hour event, and it left me with a lot to digest. My friend—with whom I attended the event—found it unremarkable. She viewed as “not credible” Dr. Hamid’s assertion that, under Saddam, it remained possible to live in a state of relative safety as long as you avoided any mention of politics, and that now even that possibility had disappeared. But I heard a lot more than that, particularly since Dr. Hamid’s anguish contained enough contradictory statements to both encourage and enrage anyone holding any position on the current situation in Iraq.

The word that kept coming to my mind as I heard her speak was “frustration.” It was painful just to listen to her talk. Imagine what life has been like for this woman. Saddam came to power and suppressed any notion of individual liberties and rights. People accommodated themselves to it. Then war with Iran brought bombs into their cities and sent their children to become cannon fodder. People accommodated themselves to it. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait, a brief war followed, and the international community imposed a long painful sanctions regime. Material goods disappeared, the education system collapsed, and a terrified but educated and relatively affluent middle class society slid into abject poverty. Dr. Hamid’s son finished his dental degree and found a job paying $1.50 a month (“enough to buy a sandwich”). People accommodated themselves to it. Then the Americans ended the sanctions, toppled Saddam, and anarchy emerged.

It’s hard to hear this story without wanting to scream: ENOUGH! WHEN DOES IT EVER END? I can only imagine what it must be like to have to live it. But the even tougher challenge is to imagine what to do about it. Yes, much of what Dr. Hamid said was critical of the American presence. But she was equally critical of Saddam, of Iran, of the sanctions regime, and of the insurgents. That was what convinced me that I was hearing frustration, rather than anti-Americanism. Life is terrible and we are there. We must be to blame. Were we to leave, we would still be to blame. After all, we have been there since 1990; the sanctions regime that would have crumbled without U.S. support was as defining a feature of Iraqi life as is our current military presence. The idea that we “entered” Iraq in 2003 is a convenient fiction. Iraqis know that it’s not true.

And yet, Dr. Hamid had few concrete suggestions about how to make things better. In fact, I heard only one specific complaint—that U.S. forces did not act as a fire department when a major open-air market burned to the ground and destroyed many people’s meager belongings and businesses. It’s that lack of concrete ideas that makes the current situation so nettlesome. What do we owe the Iraqi people for first accommodating ourselves to Saddam, then imposing sanctions in part to force them to oust this madman on their own, then toppling his government? It’s clear what they crave—stability and normalization. THEY JUST WANT THE PAIN TO STOP.

Crafting appropriate policies is tough work. But whenever we debate what those policies should be, we should remember that the key is empathy. Iraqis are in a lot of pain and they’ve been through a great deal of trauma. It will be a while before their lives become “normal.”

I have participated in policy debates elsewhere, and I will continue to do so—but not here. Much as I spent Tuesday evening with a small, vicarious sense of frustration and pain, I’d prefer to keep this posting clean. The only real message that I can share is that anything you hear from or about “how Iraqis feel about the U.S.” is likely to be self-contradictory. We contributed to their pain, we’re still around, and they still hurt. I suspect that much of what we’re hearing is generalized frustration pointed in our direction.

I posted this message last week on TMPCafe’s Foreign Affairs table.

Got kudos from Jim Texan--who usually rates my foreign policy postings “dangerous.” Just goes to show what can happen when you emote. Another important blogging lesson.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 06/28 at 12:25 AM in Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders